Section
2:
Left-right mythology

In 1983, Howard Gardner, also studying patients with damage to different parts of the brain, published Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and changed the way many people thought about intelligence, teaching, and learning.

Multiple Intelligences

To appreciate the multiple intelligences (MI) framework as proposed by Howard Gardner is to embrace the notion that individuals possess a constellation of strengths and weaknesses across the different "types" of smart. To date, Gardner's intelligences include: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalist, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

Read more

Enable Javascript to see more information

(Opened ScienceTalk sidebar)

Multiple Intelligences

Dr. Joanna A. Christodoulou works at the intersection of education and neuroscience with roles as a scientist (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), clinician (Children's Hospital, Boston), instructor/professor (Harvard University; Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at MGH Institute of Health Professions), and practitioner.

To appreciate the multiple intelligences (MI) framework as proposed by Howard Gardner is to embrace the notion that individuals possess a constellation of strengths and weaknesses across the different "types" of smart. To date, Gardner's intelligences include: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, naturalist, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. (These intelligences are described in the table below.) We have all felt enabled and adept at some tasks, whether they involved music, language, or math. But we have each felt the sting of being in situations where what was expected of us was challenging, difficult, and all the more frustrating when we were required to do it someone else's "way" rather than our own.

A key point here is that multiple intelligences describe different ways of perceiving and processing information; these are not characteristics that are inherent in a given task per se, but rather in the learner. Many tasks could be completed by drawing on different intelligences, just as many lessons can be communicated using multiple frameworks based on MI. How the mind interacts with the environment and the demands of the task at hand is relevant to every learning situation. So, rather than being concerned with how "smart" someone may be based on an IQ test, educators can better serve their students by working to figure out how they are smart.

Relating the theory of MI to the brain is more complicated. An exciting idea that may attract us to MI is that each intelligence maps onto a distinct part of the brain: The linguistic intelligence has a corresponding part in the brain, for example. However, neuroimaging research on higher-order cognitive skills and abilities, including intelligence, so far has suggested a reliance on a system of brain regions, rather than a single spot. In order to address this topic specifically in regard to MI, a series of neuroimaging studies, which have yet to be conducted, is required. It should be noted that the intelligences identified have met the criteria related to the consequences of brain damage, but identifying the underlying systems supporting each requires further evidence about brain functioning when there is no damage. A promising hypothesis is that each intelligence relies on a distinct network of coordinated brain regions.

Until there is a deeper understanding of the relationship between how the brain is structured and how it functions in relation to intelligence and cognitive potential, MI remains a powerful idea for shaping educational thought, but not yet one about brain-behavior relationships. However, MI provides a framework for considering essential points about learners:

A given task can be completed in more than one way, even if there is one right answer. This distinction is referred to as "process versus outcome."

A consideration of the interaction between a person's profile of intelligences and the demands of the task yields the most helpful educational picture of his or her performance.

The brain is not constructed into discrete modules; to think about MI in terms of "spots in the brain" would be oversimplifying the theory and the brain's functionality.

Intelligence

Description

Linguistic

An ability to analyze information and create products involving oral and written language, such as speeches, books, and memos.

Logical-Mathematical

An ability to develop equations and proofs, make calculations, and solve abstract problems.

Spatial

An ability to recognize and manipulate large-scale and fine-grained spatial images.

Musical

An ability to produce, remember, and make meaning of different patterns of sound.

Naturalist

An ability to identify and distinguish among different types of plants, animals, and weather formations that are found in the natural world.

Bodily-Kinesthetic

An ability to use one's own body to create products or solve problems.

Interpersonal

An ability to recognize and understand other people's moods, desires, motivations, and intentions.

Intrapersonal

An ability to recognize and understand one's own moods, desires, motivations, and intentions.

Project Spectrum, an MI-based assessment system for young children. http://www.pz.harvard.edu/research/Spectrum.htm.

Gardner succeeded in challenging and expanding the notion of intelligence and revealed the role of cultural and social bias in how different abilities are valued and developed in children. His ideas resonated with the experiences of parents and teachers, who witnessed daily the rich variety of "talent" or "intelligence" in budding poets, mathematicians, athletes, musicians, and painters. IQ tests seemed to view people through a peephole darkly. So when Gardner offered a larger vision of human potential that jibed with observation and experience, teachers and parents rushed to embrace it.

Despite the continuing importance and validity of his richer view of human skill and of the role that culture and social forces play in learning, many educators have reduced Gardner's insights to the modular model of brain functioning that influenced his theory but proved to be too simple to fully explain the richness of the different intelligences. Many persist in believing that our brains have a music module, a language module, and a math module. They do not. The result has been years of misleading talk about designing lessons for visual learners and kinesthetic learners, left-hemisphere learners and right-hemisphere learners. "Right-brainers will rule the future," declares Daniel Pink, former White House speechwriter and author of the popular book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

Although such statements are likely meant as metaphors to suggest that those who can think creatively and emphatically will become increasingly important to businesses, they lock us into ways of thinking about brain function that reduce our understanding of the brain and, therefore, limit our ability to develop more effective models of education. This is the nature of powerful metaphors. At first, they capture our imagination and stimulate new ways of thinking about old problems; but eventually they capture us and inhibit newer insights. The left-brain/right-brain metaphor puts us into the very box out of which we encourage creative people to think.
(top)

(End of the first column online)

Tools of Neuroscience: MEG

Dr. John Gabrieli of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT describes the benefits of the MEG (magnetoencephalography), which gives us a precise measure of both the timing and location of...

More recent studies reveal that both hemispheres are involved in almost all cognitive tasks. Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other techniques like magnetoencephalography (MEG), we can now marvel at the cascade of neural activity that is associated with the reading of one simple word. Anders Dale and Eric Halgren have created a movie exploring the interplay of activity from different areas across the entire globe of the human brain during reading.

Reading a Word

New imaging tools allow us to observe the rich array of connections between many parts of the brain involved in doing anything. Reading a word, for example, is the result not of activating a...

The more we recognize and understand the complexity of the brain, the greater will be our understanding of learning—and of the inevitability of differences in how people learn and how we might teach them.

Watching the Reading Brain in Action

Imagine that you are shown one word on a computer screen, and that the activity in your brain is recorded over the course of a second. What might you expect to see in your brain? Would you expect just the reading part of the brain to show activation; if so, where would that be? Would you think that different parts of the brain coordinate to read the word? What sequence might different parts of the brain activate? These questions are intended to get you thinking not just about what parts of the brain are relied upon to read a word, but to consider the thinking processes that are integral as well.

Read more

Enable Javascript to see more information

(Opened ScienceTalk sidebar)

Watching the Reading Brain in Action

Dr. Joanna A. Christodoulou works at the intersection of education and neuroscience with roles as a scientist (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology), clinician (Children's Hospital, Boston), instructor/professor (Harvard University; Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at MGH Institute of Health Professions), and practitioner.

Imagine that you are shown one word on a computer screen, and that the activity in your brain is recorded over the course of a second. What might you expect to see in your brain? Would you expect just the reading part of the brain to show activation; if so, where would that be? Would you think that different parts of the brain coordinate to read the word? What sequence might different parts of the brain activate? These questions are intended to get you thinking not just about what parts of the brain are relied upon to read a word, but to consider the thinking processes that are integral as well.

When cognitive neuroscience researchers put these sorts of questions together, they are able to use cutting-edge neuroimaging technologies to answer them. Using a novel approach to record brain activations (Dale et al., 2000), the "Reading A Word" video was created by Anders Dale and Eric Halgren. The video relies on the combination of two neuroimaging technologies: MRI and MEG. MRI is an excellent tool for determining where in the brain activation occurs. In the same way, MEG is a tool best used to determine when in the brain activation occurs. Taken together, we are able to view the intricacies of the reading brain in action both in terms of time and place, by viewing the results of these technologies combined.

Take a look at the video a few times. Once you have taken in the majestic ebb and flow of brain activations in the video, consider how it compared to your ideas of what it takes to read one word as an adult. In a split second, swaths of brain regions are awash in a red and orange hue. (Of course, the brain doesn't actually light up colorfully, but scientists apply statistical analyses to brain data to create graphical depictions representing the areas with changes in brain activity, which you can't see otherwise.) As you can see, the sequence is not random: Activations begin in the back of the brain, where the visual system is largely situated, and move forward to the front of the brain where systems for articulation of a word and activating its meaning are based. In the video, we see a carefully crafted choreography of brain activations for reading even a single word. We are not born with the functional wiring to be readers; this process requires years of reading practice that goes along with the rewiring and recycling of the brain's systems for other purposes, such as vision, audition, translating between symbol systems (sounds and letters), attention, and memory. In the flash of activations seen in the video, we can easily see how involved such a seemingly simple task becomes when we peek behind the curtain that is masking the workings of the brain.

The "Reading A Word" video reveals the dynamic and distributed reading systems required to read a single word. Rather than a unidirectional, static, single stream of activation, the brain regions recruited for a single word tell a story of the brain's interactive approach to reading.

Glossary

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

A neuroimaging technique using radio and magnetic waves to indirectly index brain activity relative to specific task comparisons.

magnetoencephalography (MEG)

A neuroimaging technique that detects the magnetic properties of electrical impulses resulting from neuronal communication to produce maps of brain activity relative to a task. MEG is used most typically for research purposes to investigate cognitive and psychological processes. The main strength of MEG is the high temporal resolution; the main limitation is the relatively limited spatial resolution. Based on these characteristics, MEG is most effective for investigating questions of timing in brain activity rather than where in the brain activity originates.